Editorial: Not just about the numbers

Just in time for the beginning of this year's session of the Legislature on Tuesday, a report from the University of Alabama says the state's anti-immigration law is costing the state tens of millions of dollars in lost sales and income taxes.

Dr. Samuel Addy, an economist and director of UA's Center for Business and Economic Research, says in the report that the law is hurting the state's economy in several ways. That conclusion, said state Rep. Micky Hammon, R-Decatur, is simply "baloney."

"It's clear the study overestimates the negative and underestimates the positive to skew the result toward an agenda," Hammon told The Times' Brian Lawson. "If 40,000 illegal workers leave the state, they free up jobs that homegrown Alabamians are happy to have." Maybe.

The study presents a range of estimated effects based on the number of workers who may have left their jobs and how much they made.

In 2010, there were an estimated 95,000 undocumented aliens in the state work force. If 40,000 of them left and they were making an average of $15,000 each, that would represent a loss of $2.3 billion in wages, $56.7 million in state sales and income taxes, and $20 million in city and county sales taxes. This is the study's minimum figure and it isn't outlandish at all.

If the study underestimates the positive, that's because there simply aren't any figures available for such things as the cost of emergency room care for illegal immigrants, or how much the state spends on education of their children, whose parents support education through sales taxes.

Hammon and the law's other co-sponsor, state Sen. Scott Beason, R-Gardendale, promoted it as a jobs bill that would run illegal immigrants out of the state and allow unemployed Alabamians to take their place.

"It doesn't take a Ph.D. to see that since the law was signed, unemployment has dropped from 10 percent to 8.1 percent," Hammon said. "In Marshall County, once a known hotbed for illegal immigration, unemployment has plunged from 10 percent in June to 6.9 percent last month."

But it's not clear yet to what extent the law can be credited for the decline in statewide unemployment. The national jobless rate has been falling, too, as the economy continues a slow expansion, though Alabama's rate has been falling faster.

State employment figures show that 13,000 people gave up looking for work in December. That's hardly proof the law is putting people back to work. In addition, 158,598 fewer people had jobs in Alabama in December than about this time four years ago. That decline in employment is far more likely because of the recession than illegal immigration. Alabama's unemployment rate didn't begin climbing until several months after the national jobless rate started growing as the recession set in.

Hammon pointed to a steep decline in unemployment in Marshall County. Most of the jobs illegal aliens have held there are in poultry processing plants, not the "good jobs" that Alabama politicians like to brag about bringing to the state.

Certainly, some illegal aliens have taken jobs as roofers, carpenters, brick masons, cooks, janitors, landscapers and field hands. But nobody has been able to put a figure on how many jobs they may have taken from legal residents, or how many legal residents have replaced those who have fled the state.

So far there hasn't been a lot of hard data that could be used to weigh the costs and benefits of the law. Maybe that isn't the way the law should be judged, anyway.

It should have been enough to require employers to use the federal E-Verify system to check employees' and job applicants' immigration status. Instead, the law set out to turn good Samaritans into felons. It gave the state the power to harass illegal immigrants by denying them public services, charge them with trespassing just for being in Alabama, and, in effect, break up families.

The fallout from the law isn't just about the numbers.

By Mike Hollis, for the editorial board. Email: mike.hollis@htimes.com.